Election Countdown, 295 Days to Go: Fortune-Telling vs Reporting.

It can be a golden age for people telling the stories of our times. If we can stop talking about messaging and polls!

An illustration from Charles Dickens’s American Notes, which chronicled his travels in America in 1842. This image accompanied his description of a visit to the White House, and of the anteroom where he and others waited to meet President John Tyler. (Of ‘Tippecanoe and Tyler Too’ renown.) Dickens wrote that the president “looked somewhat worn and anxious, and well he might; being at war with everybody.” Some things never change. [Getty Images.]

Moments before the first actual votes in the 2024 presidential contest, tonight in Iowa, this post has two purposes. Both involve the impossible-but-necessary challenge of trying to imagine how history will look back on our times, while we are living through them.

—The first is straightforward. It is a bullet-point list of developments in recent days that might eventually loom large in accounts of our times—or might, on the contrary, trickle away into the memory-hole.

—The second is to note how much time, money, and emphasis goes in a conventional, clichéd, and ill-fated way of coping with historical unknowability. And to suggest what could be a productive and even exciting different approach.

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1) ‘A cloud no bigger than a man’s hand…’

Here is an incomplete of things that have happened in the first weeks of this election year, any of which might amount to something much larger. Or not—for now it is impossible to tell:

• GOP: The Republican candidate most willing to call Donald Trump dangerous and unfit, Chris Christie, dropped out of the race. And the most plausible remaining figures, Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis, ran “against” Trump while seeming frightened to criticize him.¹
  We can’t be sure that Trump will be the nominee. But if he is, it is now certain that GOP officialdom will line up behind him. (Despite “private” qualms and concerns.) How does their thrall to Trump end for the GOP? And for the country? We’re living through the answer.

• War: US forces struck targets in Yemen, in retaliation for attacks in the Red Sea. The front-page top headline in yesterday’s New York Times was None Wanted Regional War, But Here It Is. For American voters could this become a “hot-war” election? With US troops engaged overseas, and with all the unpredictability that “hot war” campaigns bring? Or will it remain one where the US debate mainly concerns how much to support warfare by others?
  And in these same past few days: the International Court of Justice began hearing South Africa’s case against Israel for genocide; the US Secretary of Defense was hospitalized for many days without informing the President; Russian forces strengthened their hold on Ukraine’s eastern front; and there’s the southern border. Which of these will seem most consequential ten months from now?

• The courts: A judge in New York heard closing arguments in the real-estate fraud case against Trump. This was of course the “penalty” stage of the trial, about how many millions Trump will need to pay; he has already been ruled guilty on the merits. Will Trump’s ever-increasing legal problems suddenly become political obstacles for him? Or remain this cycle’s version of the Access Hollywood tape—“That’s just Trump”?

• Also in the courts: One day last week, Hunter Biden was in a hearing room in Washington where a House committee discussed whether to subpoena him. The next day, he was in a courtroom in California to answer federal tax-fraud charges. Will these political and legal problems blow up to become decisive factors in his father’s prospects? As the email “scandal” did for Hillary Clinton? Or will they remain niche obsessions, this cycle’s version of the endless Benghazi hearings, or “Pizzagate”?

• The actual government: Another GOP leader in the House, another possibility of budgetary brinksmanship. “For real” this time? With rippling economic and political effects?

I realize that a list like this could go on forever. At the moment I offer it in the spirit of Donald Rumsfeld’s famous “known unknowns.” It is worth remembering the way Rumsfeld completed that thought:

We know there are known unknowns: that is to say we know there are some things that we know we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tends to be the difficult one.²

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2) The huge missed opportunity for the press.

As you might have heard, today’s news organizations are mostly not swimming in money. Here’s an outline of how they could make better use of the resources they do have, and likely build both audience and trust for the long haul.

-In short, give us many fewer stories about what might happen in politics weeks or months from now—which the reporters can’t know when they’re writing the stories, and which readers will eventually find out anyway.

-And instead use the time, money, and status-markers within the business to produce more stories about what is happening now—which today’s news organizations are historically well equipped to provide.

The first part of this—the stories we don’t need—is a familiar point everywhere except at the assignment desks for news organizations. (This is related to Jay Rosen’s aphorism that coverage should tell us “the stakes, not the odds.”) The three warning signs are:

• A story based on polls, which are manufactured “news” for the those sponsoring them but only shakily connected to reality;

• A story based on framing any developing in terms of “how this will play” politically, which is the reporter’s guess about what voters will think³; and

• A story on which candidate has “momentum” or “traction” based on the vibe at events.⁴

Some times these predictive stories turn out to be correct. Frequently not. In this fallibility they are like stock-market picks or the point spread on football games, but with less consequence for being wrong. And if news organizations had limitless time, space, and budgets, you could perhaps say, What’s the harm.

But here’s the missed opportunity, apart from all the distortions in public life.